Feelings are not for public display unless the situation calls for it. People in this warn torn and politically divided nation opt to keep their feelings in the recesses of their hearts unless pressed hard to do otherwise. Amid the raging issues of the day, many would chose to hold back reactions and just busy themselves doing what could make them survive for the day. The call of the stomach is to many the primary concern that must be attended to over all other concerns. Indeed, the impoverished masses do not have any idea of that hierarchy of needs for to them there is only one primary need which is top of all, never mind the needs that follow, whatever the nature and classification may be. The real concern sans others is to find food that could make them live for the day, without which, all their being is put to great peril, on the brink of death.
The deprivation of many less privileged if not underprivileged among the poor is devastating in the real sense. To the person who could barely find food to feed ones hunger and those in the family that depend on him, the inability to have that basic need causes, more than physical weakness, mental imbalance. Hunger drives people to wild thoughts, if not actions, that bring danger to the person and others in the community. An empty stomach can cause malfunctions in both mind and body, with consequences beyond normal imagination. Many tragic ends had been traced to such cause and though there are efforts aimed at dispelling the causal connection, there are manifest proofs in support of the same.
Amid the economic rescission, government is projecting an image that the country is on an unprecedented economic rise. It is trying hard conditioning the public mind that the country is economically stable and its people are fine. Advertisements are regularly published on all media fronts just to remind the people that the economy is healthy. Poor people from the less privileged sectors of society had been tapped to proclaim the good news about the good things that government had been doing and is continue achieving under the present leadership.
Those who passively watch the advertisements about the proclamations of the country’s progress are often caught bewildered. It is truly hard discerning where progress is flowing from and for whom because in reality what poor people feel are the contrary. Employment is tough to find and when one finds, it is only good as that, employment, and in some misfortunate cases, underemployment, as even such do not actually redound to gainful economic activity. We know too well how employment has kept many workers in the clutches of grinding poverty despite ones industry.
All the advertisements about the economic progress that people purportedly feel are after all devoid of meaning. The real situation of the poor and deprived masses depicts a vivid picture that is in contrast from what government is projecting and which government would want believed by the masses. While no one has dared to openly refute the expensive government advertisements about people feeling good and feels too well the economic progress. The picture of the economy is well retouched or even implanted by a mask. Its true economic condition was only revealed by that harrowing and horrible tale of a mother feeding her three children with poison, and herself thereafter, in a somber despair over having no food to feed. Feel?
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